Rushkoff on "The Great Facebook Land Grab of Aught-Nine"

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At one minute past midnight Eastern Time this Saturday, Facebook users will be permitted to claim a unique user name, which may well spark a virtual vanity landgrab the likes of which we've never seen. Author and former BB guestblogger Douglas Rushkoff says this is the moment when Facebook becomes obsolete.

This is more than 200 million users, already engaged, simultaneously scrambling in the greatest territory dash since the Oklahoma Territory's land run of 1889, albeit with fewer shotgun injuries.

But Facebook's new page-naming scheme actually brings up other memories for me, ones that hold bigger stakes for the company itself. It reminds me of the moment that AOL, formerly a completely closed network with its own content, allowed its users onto the greater Internet for the first time. Internet USENET boards were filled with what we called "newbies" wandering around and asking anyone they could find how to download pornography. Formerly high-level conversations were quickly brought down to the lowest common denominator as a huge population of people uninitiated in basic Internet etiquette flooded the networks faster than we could educate them.

The impact was far worse for AOL. By opening itself to the greater Internet, AOL revealed itself as something of a wading pool. A mini-Internet. Once people could use AOL as a portal to the true, unadulterated, global net, the company was reduced to an ISP. AOL became series of phone numbers you dial to get online, and little more. Steve Case knew his moment was over, and used his inflated stock price to purchase some real assets like Time Warner. We all know how that turned out.

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I don’t agree with the AOL metaphor, facebook is not a gateway it’s an aggregator. Sure everyone has a blog, but it’s a lot faster to skim through their facebook entries or tweets than it is to individually load everyone’s different blog pages with their unique interfaces and various annoying quirks. Facebook is a consistant centralized way to get the same information quickly.

I remember seeing people buying and trading celebrity screen names. I don’t know if any of them were actually used but weird insight into celebritydom. I for one will be desperately trying to register Paris Hilton as my facebook name.

If anything, opening up AOL to the wider Net *increased* its subscriber base.

And I totally don’t get the AOL analogy. Facebook was first adopted by tech savvy college kids, and then by tech savvy web users (especially in Silicon Valley), and *then* the mainstream market came in. Exactly the opposite pattern from AOL.

The AOL comparison is specious at best. Facebook numbers *dwarf* AOL numbers at it’s peak, and already is a household name. One might argue that Facebook, by moving from techie students to my mom and your gramma, already has addressed the lowest common denominator on the web.

Allowing me a name/URL that makes more sense than ?u=76876458734 isn’t going to create a flood of n00bs, and it isn’t going to create sentience in the n00bs already there, who will now going stomping about on your precious n00b free webverse.

Like they’d say “Wow, I could get myname.com and then attract 200 million users to find out what my pirate name should be”?

milovoo: …facebook is not a gateway it’s an aggregator. Sure everyone has a blog, but it’s a lot faster to skim through their facebook entries or tweets than it is to individually load everyone’s different blog pages with their unique interfaces and various annoying quirks.

This is an interesting point, but then again, there are a lot of other open blogging communities (LiveJournal, Blogger, Vox, etc) which FaceBook will now be competing with much more directly.

W. James Au: Rushkoff’s analysis is factually wrong: AOL started losing subscribers not when it opened up the walled garden, but after it bought Time-Warner in 2000…

The article doesn’t say that opening up to the internet caused subscriptions to fall; it says that opening up to the internet revealed AOL’s irrelevance to its subscribers. The unfiltered internet was a better AOL than AOL was.

Not to be another college student saying “I had facebook before you did” but for all the non college students out there…well, I did.

The allure of facebook to me 4 years ago was the college exclusivity to it. You could only register with a university email address, which made me feel SO COOL when I was preparing to go to school. I friended everyone in my classes (a feature they should have kept) and felt like I had made best friends. Which obviously never happened, and as soon as I got to campus all the people I had been chatting with all summer and I completely ignored each other.

I do agree that the use of facebook has completely changed since its conception. I think everybody knows that. This new name thing may be another thing that people complain about, create groups that threaten to leave facebook, and then never do it.

Good point, and let’s not also forget that the rest of the internet sucked rocks for the average user and AOL was valuable in guiding them. It was when the Internet caught up, with friendly UI, intuitive http://www.domainnames.com that users demanded AOL make it easier to hop the gate. It was a perfect storm.

Facebook wants to be your online identity hub, like chi.mp is also trying. In order to effectively do that, however, they need to give easily memorable, business-card ready URL’s to users.

This seems reasonably useful to me, as I’d really like a centralized service that told me where my friends ALSO are on the net- when I recently joined last.fm, the last thing I wanted to do was search for each friend, one by one.

Facebook’s figured out the front door to my online identity, but they’re still giving me piss-poor tools to filter access. Chi.mp lets me show a very different face to different groups that I define, but Facebook still isn’t very good at letting me show one face to my professional contacts, one face to my family, one face to my friends, and one face to “everyone else.”

To be a useful net “hub,” Facebook’s got to get their access filtering under control, and let me create different profiles for different viewers.

I often enjoy Rushkoff’s thoughts, but on this issue I find myself diverging a little bit.

A brief moment of irony is in order… I thought the days of land grabs were long past! This article puts the property back into Intellectual Property. The digital world eliminated scarcity, right? Except usernames, I guess.

Land grab is in itself a weird analogy… I think only a small fraction of participants will be attempting to ‘over-reserve’ — grab more than their share of usernames. Sure, I want the 2-3 that I juggle to manage my social networking. But Paris Hilton? Meh.

Finally, the AOL analogy has been debunked a bit, but not enough… I really don’t believe that Facebook users are newbie/clueless like the days of the AOL exodus. Rushkoff needs to talk to more teens.

I counter-predict: Facebook will be consigned to the dustbin only when its successor appears.

I’m severely annoyed by this, as I’ll be on a plane to Switzerland at 12:01 Saturday morning, with no internet access. By the time I get to my eventual destination in Stuttgart, Germany, I’ll be resigned to InkaR|\|aD1n3.94839. Sigh.

Agreed with #1: The AOL metaphor is way off base. I can see the servers getting overloaded and people panicking over nothing. Don’t think this will affect FB’s standing one way or the other, especially once people realize it’s much ado over nothing. This is just another case of yelling fire in a crowded theater.

It reminds me of the moment that AOL, formerly a completely closed network with its own content, allowed its users onto the greater Internet for the first time. Internet USENET boards were filled with what we called “newbies” wandering around and asking anyone they could find how to download pornography.

Lagged2Death: …, there are a lot of other open blogging communities (LiveJournal, Blogger, Vox, etc) which FaceBook will now be competing with much more directly.

And there’s RSS/Atom, which just flattens everything..

… and for every new blog community I start reading I have to: add them to NoScript so they work right, sort out how to access archives if I missed something, create a username so I can comment non-anonymously, etc. I prefer to have a single unified consistent interface.

Also the same reason I don’t use RSS for casual browsing, it’s just kind of ugly. I probably could smarten it up and organize it, but to what end. Facebook already works the way I want.

I fail to see how this is a game changer in any way whatsoever…
Ooh you can have facebook.com/user
Because Myspace and every other user based webservice have totally never had this feature…
The only amusing thing this has generated is all the illiterate facebookers whining on the facebook blog…

The thing people who use facebook and like it like about it is that it is an easy way to hook up with and organize your contacts with friends, family and contacts. It’s not the best way perhaps but it’s the closest thing many of us have to a public square in our disjointed lives. In my own life it has brought back correspondence between myself and friends that would otherwise not have happened, because we simply lost track of each other. All of the applications I find are like board games or coffee table books at a party, they are conversation pieces that’s all.

I think the domain name thing is irrelevant it doesn’t change what people use fb for.